They say that the failure to bail out Lehman Brothers was a mistake. But given the fact that the cost of the bails that did go through continues to grow, I don’t buy this line of reasoning.
The Fed has marked down the Bear Stearns assets from $29,526 million to $26,802 million this week. This is a mark down of $2.7 billion or 9.2%. The Fed is now underwater by a little over $2 billion plus lost interest.
In case you weren’t keeping tabs (the number and variety of handout-recipients grows with every passing day), AIG was first given a loan (really, akin to a maximum borrowing authorization) of $85 billion with much fanfare and high drama, which was later quietly increased by another $37.8 billion. In the last ten days, AIG has said it intended to borrow perhaps as much as $10 billion through a separate, new commercial paper program.
Bloomberg indicates that AIG is now saying that it might need even more dough, although its latest plea does not have a figure attached to it.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Front Page, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.